The greatest liberal theologian of the era, Friedrich Schleiermacher, would try mightily to rescue the reality of the numinous from the maw of a Kantian reality limited to the world as conveyed to the senses. In his book On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, Schleiermacher’s exquisite prose (rendered so well in the novelist George Eliot’s English translation) expresses hope that Kant’s critique might inspire high and sublime thoughts of religion as “the sense and taste for the Infinite.” Still, the ship of Christian orthodoxy had run aground.68 And ever after, its claims to truth would be subject to modernity’s suspicious scrutiny.
Following Kant, the radical critiques of religion developed by Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud demonstrated the far-reaching consequences of the intellectual shift. Feuerbach judged the beliefs of the Christian faith to be mere human projections. Scared to acknowledge their own boundless potential, humans had naively projected their infinite value onto a screen of transcendence and named that image God. Marx decried religion an “opiate of the masses,” a drug that constrains freedom and keeps the working class servile. From his vantage point in the analyst’s chair, Freud diagnosed religion as a neurotic symptom, a “universal obsessional neurosis,” which might be relieved by greater self-knowledge. In this manner, Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as the “holy wedlock of the Universe with the incarnated Reason for a creative, productive embrace” was just what the psychoanalyst would expect of a north German Pietist with a hankering for maternal intimacy.69 Religion could, at best, help emotionally feeble men cope with irrational needs, Freud reasoned.
It must be allowed that these three radical critiques have something in common: all assume that questions of human nature and the rest of reality are best answered in a scientific, nontheistic fashion. That was not traditionally the way of theology, of course, and for good reason. But the makers of Protestant liberalism wanted to carve out a space within this new modern world for religion. Claiming, however, that knowledge of God must be based on some mode or dimension of human experience (beauty, moral order, inner bliss, political loyalty), Protestant liberal thought lead to a theological dead end. Indeed, it lead to the conclusion that God is but an extension of human experience, a projection of human need and longing. The liberal theologians tried so hard to accommodate the gospel to the modern world that they ended up surrendering the faith “to the patterns, forces, and movements of human history and civilization” and to an “uncritical and irresponsible subservience” to these patterns, forces, and movements.70 This would be Karl Barth’s critique, the incitement for his neo-orthodox reclamation of a transcendent God. For him and his sympathizers, liberal Protestantism had drained the Christian gospel until it was no more than a principle, a set of moral values, a cultural or political program. The church could not live such a bloodless life.
In a way, the German Christians were merely carrying on the work of their Protestant liberal forebears, recasting doctrine according to social utility. One target of their assault on historic Christianity was the clause in the Nicene Creed known as the filioque, which had been brought to Germany by Charlemagne at the end of the eighth century in the fight against paganism, though the church in Rome would not adopt it for another two hundred years. When it did, the Latin phrase meaning “and (from) the Son,” filioque—by which the Holy Spirit is understood to proceed from the Father and from the Son—would for the next millennium be the cornerstone of how the Western church understood the nature of the triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
In their formulations of Trinitarian doctrine, the church fathers were at pains to work out the relations among the three parts of the Godhead; once the Son was established as the only begotten of the Father, the Spirit’s affiliation could not remain undefined lest it become its own judge and justification, which is precisely what had happened. And so the Spirit would be said in the West to proceed from both Father and Son. In the East, meanwhile, the Orthodox churches would insist on procession from the Father alone, in accordance with the Greek text of Christianity’s pivotal fourth-century Council of Nicea; the doctrine would become the stuff of Christianity’s fifteenth-century Great Schism. But through it all, the filioque dogma would endure in the West—at least before the German Christians.
But the clerics of the German Christian Church would recast the Holy Spirit as an ethos instead of a person: “a nature spirit, a folk spirit, Germanness in its essence.”71 And in Nazi political theology the “third article of the Trinity” would be replaced with an “ethno-national” ideal. No less blasphemously, the Spirit was supposed to proceed from the Führer as well as the Father, and from nature, history, and nation.
Bonhoeffer pronounced the Nazi doctrine a heresy. The German Christians hailed their creed as “undegenerate Christianity.”72
Theology has always mattered: the heretical turn of the German Christians can be directly connected with the catastrophe that followed. Bonhoeffer’s friend Julius Rieger, director of the seminary in Naumburg, would describe the political consequences, and the genealogy, of theological error this way: “The crypt is below, the cathedral on top of it.… First nature’s grace, then Christ’s grace. First creation, then redemption.… It is a struggle between Germanic folk religiosity and the church.… This all goes back to liberal theology.”73
With the explosive force of their Nazi theological artillery, the German Christians pounded the uncooperative doctrines of the church into submission—and usually beyond recognition. The doctrine of the cross was now understood to mean that “public interest comes before self-interest.”74 The church represented the communal expression of the German genius. The savior whom Paul had called “the first-born of the dead” was now the first of the storm troopers.
On July 17, 1933, Bonhoeffer wrote to Sutz in Switzerland to apologize for being a bad correspondent. “Please forgive me,” he said, “but I think you know yourself why it had to be so.” He had been completely absorbed with all that was happening in the church. “We are now about to come to a decision,” Bonhoeffer said, “which I think will be of the utmost church-political significance. There is no doubt in my mind that the victory will go to the German Christians, and this will very quickly bring into view the contours of the new church, and the question will be whether we can even support it as the church. I am afraid, though, that we are crumbling gradually but steadily, that we no longer have the strength to act together. Then we will be back to small, unauthorized gatherings.”
Bonhoeffer asked Sutz’s counsel, but not before asking, only half in jest, whether Sutz might be able to find him a “nice professorship … there in Switzerland.”
On July 23, 1933, the German Christians prevailed in the elections for representatives to local parish councils.75 It was in the north and east of Germany that the National Socialist Party drew its strongest support: German Christians held large majorities among the clergy and laity of the Old Prussian Union, nearly 75 percent of the vote of the regional church that included Berlin and Wittenberg. After the elections in June, which secured the synod leadership, the German Christians assumed control of seven of the union’s eight provincial branches. Only Westphalia “retained a non–German Christian majority,” though this was less the result of dissent in the parishes than of “an intentionally undemocratic filtering system that protected higher synods from the Nazi sympathizers.”76 Beyond the domain of the Old Prussian Union, ecclesial loyalty to the National Socialists solidified rapidly, as Gleichschaltung was carried on with ever-greater force. Having taken control of church leadership, the most militant of the Deutsche Christen now had a new purpose: the consolidation of the Lutheran Church and the Nazi state.
The elections of July 23 had heralded a great spiritual surrender to the world-epochal mission of the Führer.
Hitler was, of course, not a Protestant. Like Heidegger, he was a lapsed Roman Catholic who sought to remake the world into a liturgy of his own design. On a more practical level, Hitler needed the churches’ cooperat
ion, and so on July 14, he ordered the Protestant leadership to elect a new bishop and to do it on July 23.77 He had no doubt that his machinations would lead to the consecration of the credulous Ludwig Müller.
With only a fortnight’s notice, the German Christians launched a frenzied national publicity campaign to lay the groundwork for victory. Large rallies were held on university campuses where students had been coached to break out in “spontaneous” support of Müller. As Bonhoeffer biographer Schlingensiepen writes, “ ‘Spontaneous’ was one of the Nazis’ favorite words for actions planned by the Party. Years later, boys who had dutifully attended Hitler Youth meetings would be asked what those meetings entailed; they would be given to reply, ‘We practiced spontaneous applause.’ ”78
It was during these days leading to the episcopal election that Bonhoeffer received his first visit from the Gestapo, most likely in response to a letter he’d circulated, “To Members and Friends of the Young Reformation Movement.” Bonhoeffer had written to dissenting ministers and urged them to be on the alert for party members and sympathizers visiting their churches. He asked the pastors to let him know “immediately when interference of any kind occurs in their congregations or in others known to them.” Interference would appear at his door shortly thereafter in the form of two Nazi security agents, come to warn Bonhoeffer to cease and desist in his efforts to block Müller’s election; should he fail to comply, he would be sent to a concentration camp.79 Bonhoeffer in turn instructed his comrades in the Young Reformation Group to “to destroy all privately produced leaflets and to distribute only those received from our Reich office.”
On August 5, with the German Evangelical Church now under the leadership of Müller, Bonhoeffer traveled to the city of Bielefeld, just north of Teutoburg Forest in Westphalia, to meet with fellow dissenting ministers at the charity hospital called Bethel. The town by the same name was built around the hospital, which had been established by the church in 1867 to care for those suffering “seizure afflictions” and which now nursed the physically disabled, as well as those suffering from a variety of mental disorders. Physicians, nurses, ministers, staff, and patients all lived together on the hospital grounds.80
A theological school nearby was sympathetic to the Young Reformation Group, which made Bethel a safe place to work from. The goal was to hammer out a theological statement that would clarify the basis for their dissent and thus to draft a confession “suitable for our times.” The group convening in Bethel wanted their statement to register protest as well as give encouragement to those pastors—the “lonely warriors”—trying faithfully to serve their parishes under the new constraints.
At an opening service on August 15, the theologians and pastors were joined for worship in the redbrick church on Zion Hill by the hospital staff and patients. The evening made a deep impression on Bonhoeffer. After such a rancorous summer, it was good for the brethren to gather and to sing hymns and hear the Word preached to “elderly tramps who’d wandered in from the country roads,” to “children from the lab school,” the hospital doctors, chaplains, families from the village, epileptics, deaconesses and nurses standing by to watch any patient suffering from seizures, to catch them should they suffer one and fall.
“Here we have a part of the church that still knows what the church can be concerned with and what it cannot,” Bonhoeffer wrote to his grandmother Julie.81 He’d had a sudden vision of Rembrandt’s etching The Hundred Guilder Print, always one of his favorites by the Dutch master. It depicts chapter 19 of the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus heals the sick, debates the Pharisees, and bids them to let the little ones come to him. “Today in church was the first time it really struck me,” Bonhoeffer wrote, reflecting upon how Jesus not only conferred special grace on the infirm and the weak but favored them. In the same reflection, in a rare but commodious turn to non-Western religions, Bonhoeffer is also reminded of the Buddha, whose conversion from the worldly life of a prince to one of contemplative discipline, some have said, was inspired “by an encounter with a desperately sick person.” That encounter may have also inspired the Buddha’s declaration to his disciples that “he who attends the sick, attends me,” wisdom inescapably familiar to readers of Matthew 25:40: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” “What utter madness that some people today think that the sick can or ought to be legally eliminated,” Bonhoeffer wrote.
After a productive week, the pastoral group had completed a draft of a new confession. It affirmed as basic tenets both the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the Abrahamic origins of Christianity—and also that the denial of either amounted to the renunciation of one’s baptism. The divine election of Israel was built on a promise that shall never be broken; therefore, “[God] continues to preserve a ‘holy remnant’ of Israel after the flesh, which can be neither absorbed into another nation by emancipation and assimilation … nor be exterminated by Pharaoh-like measures.” The Bethel Confession, as it came to be known, stated that the “holy remnant” of Israel bears “the indelible stamp of the chosen people.” It further allows that no nation can be commissioned to take revenge on the Jews for the execution at Golgotha. It decries “the attempt to deprive the German Evangelical Church of its promise by the attempt to change it into a national church of Christians by Aryan descent.”82 Bonhoeffer wrote that draft in collaboration with a number of others: his former Berlin classmate Hermann Sasse, who had recently become a professor of church history at the University of Erlangen; Gerhard Stratenwerth, a staff member at Bethel; and several associates of Karl Barth—George Merz, the managing editor of the radical journal Between the Times (Zwischen den Zeiten) and godfather of Barth’s son Matthias; Hans Fischer, a pastor in Bochum and former student of Barth’s in Münster; and Wilhelm Vischer, an Old Testament scholar in residence at Bethel who would later be one of Barth’s colleagues at the University of Basel. It ended with a call for the immediate repeal of the Aryan paragraph.83
Although this, as with any theological collaboration, produced heated debate, Bonhoeffer was pleased with the breadth and clarity of the results, given here:
The facts of salvation history to which the Scriptures bear witness (i.e., the election of Israel and the condemnation of its sin, the revelation of the Law of Moses, the incarnation, the teachings and deeds of Jesus Christ, his death on the cross and his resurrection, the founding of the church) are unique revelatory acts of God, which the church has to proclaim as such and as valid for us today as well. In accordance with the confessions of the Protestant churches of the Reformation period, we reject the false doctrine, in whatever form it may occur, that Christ may also testify to himself outside the Scriptures and without them. We reject the false doctrine that presents the history of salvation as a parable, for example, that the election of Israel as God’s chosen people can be applied to any other people, or perhaps to all peoples. This is a denial of the uniqueness and the historicity of God’s revelation.
For the same reason we reject the false doctrine that recognizes the Old Testament only as the Bible of Jesus, that is, of the original Christian church, and recognizes its validity only in that context (religious anti-Semitism).
We reject the false doctrine that says we confess Jesus as our Lord because of his heroic devotion. He is our Lord only because he is sent by our Father, the Son and Savior crucified and resurrected for us. With the confessions we hereby reject the error of the new Arians, “that Christ is not true, essential God by nature, of one eternal divine essence with God the Father and the Holy Spirit, but that he is merely adorned with divine majesty under and alongside God the Father.”
God glorifies his overflowing faithfulness in remaining true to Israel according to the flesh.
The Bethel Confession, especially in this first draft, before falling into the hands of critics and redactors in subsequent editorial sessions, exemplified Christian orthodoxy’s subversive potential in the face of an idolatrous regime.
Bo
nhoeffer returned to Berlin convinced that the “big, völkisch national church” of German Protestantism could no longer “be reconciled with Christianity.” The church in Germany would stand or fall by its position on the “Jewish question.” The real issue was “Germanism or Christianity,” “and the sooner the conflict comes out in the open, the better.” The pursuit of a purely Germanic Christianity could only be called “a violation of the gospel,” which was to say, a heresy. Bonhoeffer had spoken hard words. And the recriminations would come quickly. When they did, he would find strength in the fellowship of dissenters at home and abroad. In a meeting of its General Synod on September 5 and 6, the Old Prussian Union, which included Berlin and Potsdam, became the first regional church to adopt the Aryan paragraph. A vote by the entire Reich Church was scheduled later in the month at the National Synod in Wittenberg.
“By adopting the Aryan paragraph,” Bonhoeffer told Barth, “the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union has separated itself from the church of Christ. We are now awaiting an answer as to whether the pastors who have signed this statement are to be dismissed, or whether one need not worry about saying this sort of thing. Several of us are now very drawn to the idea of a free church.”84
Bonhoeffer was taken aback, however, when Barth disagreed sharply with his position on the Aryan paragraph and its centrality in the Bethel Confession. Still living in Bonn—he would not move his family to Switzerland until summer 1935—the elder theologian opined that the Reich Church’s adoption of the anti-Jewish clause, though regrettable, did not rise to the level of a theological crisis. The German Protestant Church was doubtless built on a foundation of theological errors—about that Barth wholeheartedly agreed—but he did not think the time had come for schism.
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